The Sabbath, and the Lord's Day

Narrator: Chris Genthree
Duration: 3min
 •  3 min. read  •  grade level: 8
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Do we receive the Lord's Day from tradition, or from Scripture?
“If the blessed privilege of the Lord's Day depended on tradition, I for one would hold it as of no force whatever. I might bear with one who observed it, because Paul tells us to do that—' One man regardeth one day above another, another man every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.' But it does not rest on tradition. The change from the seventh day to the first is connected with the essence of Christianity and the person of the Lord Jesus. The Sabbath was the sign and seal of the old covenant, the witness that God's people had a part in the rest of God, which in itself is the very essence of our everlasting blessing. But it was then given, as all was, in connection with an earthly system, and was a sign of the rest of the old creation, as it indeed was originally so instituted in Paradise. But the rejection of the Lord when He came into that is the proof that man cannot have rest in the old creation, that he is a sinner, and needs redemption out of that state. The blessed Lord become a man, was not for that less the Lord, and came to accomplish this redemption, and as Son of Man was above all these things,—was Lord of the Sabbath as of everything else. It had been given for man in grace and goodness, though it took the form of law, as all did among the Jews. But we as redeemed have to do with the new creation. All that system has found its end in the death of Christ. Not the rest of God, but the hope of rest in the old creation. So Christ lay in the grave that Sabbath, but now He is risen, risen the first day of the week, and the first-fruits of them that slept. We begin our Christian life as the first-fruits of God's creatures. We begin as dead and risen in Christ. We do not therefore celebrate the rest of the old creation—we were utterly lost as belonging to that; but the resurrection of our blessed Lord, as the foundation and beginning of the new, when redemption was accomplished. Hence, after His resurrection, He meets His disciples that first day of the week when they were assembled, and the first or Lord's Day following, the same thing, and thenceforth it is carefully distinguished in Scripture. We learn that the disciples came together the first day of the week to break bread. (Acts 20:77And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight. (Acts 20:7)) They were to set apart in grace for the poor on the first day of the week. (1 Cor. 16) And in the Revelation it is called the Lord's day (Rev. 1:1010I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, (Revelation 1:10)), just as the Supper is called the Lord's Supper. (1 Cor. 11:2020When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper. (1 Corinthians 11:20)) Hence we own with joy the Lord's Day, as the Scripture teaches us, the first day of the week, not the seventh, in which the Lord's body lay in the grave, the witness that the old creation was judged, condemned, and passed away, —that there was no rest in it but to die. No rest for the old man; but the restlessness of sin, and the misery of its fruits. No rest in it for the new man, not for Christ, because all was polluted and alienated from God. And He teaches us that He came to work in grace, and die in it, and begin all anew, of which His resurrection, and the Lord's Day as a sign of it, is witness.—An Extract.